Traumafessions :: Reader Turnidoff on ALIEN’s Facehugger

ALIEN was the first real horror film my parents allowed me to watch. My mother saw it in the theater when she was eight months pregnant with my sister. That kind of freaked her out. I always heard stories about the “chest-burster” scene and my imagination would run wild with horrifying visuals. A few years later it aired on broadcast T.V. I was about 9 at the time, and my parents only let me watch up to the part where the facehugger dies and JOHN HURT wakes up. Conveniently, there was a commercial break right before the infamous scene, so they sent me to bed.

At that time, in my mind, the alien wasn’t the 8-foot, phallic-headed monster we all know and love, it was the spidery facehugger. That’s what I thought popped out of Cane’s chest and picked of the crew systematically one by one. I had to imagine what the rest of the movie was like with this facehugger killing all the crew.

The next day I drew a comic book called “ALIEN 2!” The plot was simple: The Facehugger escapes the ship and falls to Earth.HAL LINDEN from BARNEY MILLER fame was a beat cop who stumbles upon the facehugger who wakes up and starts destroying the city… and the only one who can stop it is, HAL LINDEN of course.

When I finally saw the entire film a few years later, I wasn’t disappointed. As a matter of fact, I was floored. It has become one of my top favorites of all time.

I guess it just goes to show you that sometimes your imagination is not always better than the real thing.

UNK SEZ: Turnidoff, do not sell your vision of a HAL LINDEN starring ALIEN sequel short. Although JAMES CAMERON‘s take is very difficult to top, yours, if made as you envisioned it, would certainly not be the worst ALIEN sequel in existence. I also think it is very generous of you to want to assist Mr. LINDEN‘s jump from the small screen into multiplexes. I always thought his mustache was made to be seen larger than life, on the big screen. In fact, now that you mention it, HAL‘s ‘stache just may be the absolute perfect foil for a wayward facehugger!

That. Is. Awesome. Hal Linden going from nice helpful cop to gritty alien fighter would’ve been enough to get me in the theater!

I saw Alien when it came out in the theater and it was the first movie that really made me jump (not counting my dad coming up behind me and going BLAH!! while watching ATTACK OF THE KILLER SHREWS on Creature Features as a youngster). It was also the kind of movie that made you want to see it over and over so after about the third or fourth viewing after I was used to it and could control my own reactions, it was even greater fun to watch others in the theater who were obviously sitting through their first viewing. I remember watching a guy in the front row who literally bounced up about two feet at the appropriate spots.

Seriously though, your parents got it backwards – they should’ve let you watch AFTER the chestbursting scene. The adult alien was scary, malevolent and created the most violence, but I think most would agree that the facehugger was by far more disturbing and effective on a visceral level. John Hurt’s character summed it up with, “I just remember some horrible dream about smothering.” And the whole ‘face rape’ concept is hard for anyone to get around…

I think that this could be the start of a throwdown between 70’s screen horror icons and 70’s tv detectives. Personally, I would like to see Jim Rockford take on the Tallman. Or if you wanna use the 1980’s: PuppetMaster vs. the guys from Riptide.

Very cool story!!! In 6th grade I made my own comic book of “Alien”(notebook paper stapled together!)…because I couldn’t find the ‘Heavy Metal’ version…when I finally did get a copy, I was suprised at how close some of the panels were to my rugged c-book…they just looked a lot better!